Cozumel Incident 9/4/11

[WSOPFAN]

There is a point in that telling that has me thinking. It's how the captain/boat had to stay on site with the injured divers because there were other divers in the water.

I had never thought about this specifically. It seems to be a dilemma. Let's say that a similar instance occurred and the injured diver(s) were not "staff" and had been doing a "normal" dive. Clearly it's not right for a boat to "abandon" other (healthy) divers in the water, and yet it seems so awful to have to delay in getting help for severely injured divers. How is this usually handled?

That is the first we heard of the other divers. So the part about it being a pleasure dive was only partly true but also adds to the fact of a very bad dive plan. Doing a dive that risky knowing if something happened they had no way to evac due to the other divers.

 

[dmoore19]

WSOPFAN, this discussion has made me realize that I have forgotten a lot about DCS. Right or wrong (as a poster asserted a page or two back) I am still working under the assumption that a given person will respond "about" the same given otherwise identical starting conditions.

That could be way wrong.

I am curious if anyone has developed a graph that gives relative risks of narcosis and O2 toxicity as a function of depth. Graphs are good for my feeble mind.

For some of your answers you may want to get a copy of Mark Powell's Deco for Divers.

 

[IJS]

There is a point in that telling that has me thinking. It's how the captain/boat had to stay on site with the injured divers because there were other divers in the water.

well there you have it, reason enough not to mix those doing tec dives and rec. Everyone on same plan and no waiting around.

 

[jamesbond]

1. If the others were on a shallow dive, was this the 2nd dive for this boat group? If
yes, did the injured dive deep the first dive too?

2. If the boat captain could radio for an ambulance, could he not radio for another
boat to either take the injured to the pier or wait for the other divers?

3. Aren't all dive operations in Cozumel required to carry company insurance?

 

[cicopo]

For the record, all diving in Cozumel is drift diving and it would be a practical impossibility to drag a tank under a boat that had to stay near the wall.


Dave Dillehay
Aldora Divers

I am aware of the drift diving & have enjoyed many there, however if the divers were in deep water the boat should have been too. Considering how easy it was for them to have extra air in whatever way they could have felt good about they ignored the risk & left it on the boat. You can't use the "too expensive" excuse in this case considering the gear sitting either at the shop or on the boat.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

A graph is near impossible because of the variables between each person and in each person themselves. What would narc you one day may provide little or no visible impairment the next. The same with being bent. It's different for every person. That's why it's nothing to mess with. Professionals know this and don't attempt dives that push the limits as far as this one did. 300feet is not as big of a deal to the properly equipped and trained diver but it is still very dangerous. What these people did was was just plain dumb. They were neither properly equipped and I would assime trained because had they been they would have had the right gasses. I just now saw the info about other divers being in the water during their stunt. What if while they were doing their dive one of the other divers had a serious issue and needed medical attention? They would have endangered that diver. The degree of recklessness and disregard for others just gets worse and worse .

 

[Blue Sparkle]

There is a point in that telling that has me thinking. It's how the captain/boat had to stay on site with the injured divers because there were other divers in the water.

well there you have it, reason enough not to mix those doing tec dives and rec. Everyone on same plan and no waiting around.

Yes, I see what you are saying. In my question though I was eliminating the "extra" circumstances so as to keep it clear. i.e. let's say it was a group of rec divers and one or two had a medical emergency, while the others were still in the water (there could still be potential "waiting around" if it was early in the dive). I have my own thoughts as to how one would handle this, but I wanted to hear from others too. When I'm reading through A&I threads I'm always thinking about "What if such-and-such happened" and how would I react, etc. so that I can learn from them.

 

[Chris66]

Is there not a recall system for most dive ops - Weghts bieng clanged together - Granted the captain would have had to find the bubbles of the other group first and then keep beating the weights together - not fool proof but hopefully DM would have heard?

 

[ScubaSteve]

There is a point in that telling that has me thinking. It's how the captain/boat had to stay on site with the injured divers because there were other divers in the water.

I had never thought about this specifically. It seems to be a dilemma. Let's say that a similar instance occurred and the injured diver(s) were not "staff" and had been doing a "normal" dive. Clearly it's not right for a boat to "abandon" other (healthy) divers in the water, and yet it seems so awful to have to delay in getting help for severely injured divers. How is this usually handled?

Source re: other divers?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Blue Sparkle]

Good point, Chris66. I have had the boat captain, during briefings, mention that he would clang on the ladder if for some reason we needed to be recalled to the boat early, and that if he did, it meant "Come back now, period." (This is rec. diving with no overhead of any type.)

In this case maybe it was complicated by its being a drift dive?

Is it ever okay to radio another boat and have them come to "take over" your in-water divers? Or would you transfer your medical-emergency divers to that boat? Another better solution I have not thought of?

Edited to add: IJS, to your earlier point about not mixing rec and tech divers on the same boat (at least for some tech dives), I can see what you are saying because think if things were reversed, and one of the shallow divers had a problem, and the boat had to wait for tech divers who had a "soft" overhead and were doing deco. You couldn't really call them back to the boat.